--- On Tue, 8/18/09, Itamar Shtull-Trauring <itamar at itamarst.org> wrote:
> Wasn't this Tocqueville's theory about the French
> Revolution? IIRC, he
> thought it was caused (among other things) by improving
> economic
> conditions that then got worse, i.e. by disappointed
> relative
> expectations, not by absolute misery.
>
[WS:] I am not sure about deTocqueville, but this is the essence of Davies' J curve theory of social revolutions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Chowning_Davies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_curve
It certainly has some explanatory power, especially in Eastern Europe which after initial success (1947 - late 1950s) experiences rapid rise of productivity and living conditions, followed by prolonged stagnation (Bernard Chavance, _The Transformation of Communist Systems_). The race riots in the US seem to fall into this category as well.
However, there are cases that clearly do not follow that model, most notably China and Russia. Chalmers Johnson's explanation of the Chinese case is opposite of the J-curve claim - Japanese occupation upset institutional order that kept peasants in line and made it possible to mobilize it for revolutionary movement.
I think Russia is a similar case - Russia's defeat in WWI weakened the organization of the army which made a great number of armed people of peasant origins available for mobilization, while Kerensky government's decision to continue the war effort (mainly on British and French request) further destabilized legitimacy of political institutions, opening the way for the October Revolution.
Yet another model, proposed by Charles Tilly claims that social movements originate in the shifts of balance of power among elites; certain elite groups may incorporate social movements too boost their own power vis a vis other groups, which in turn gives the momentum to the social movement. Fascist revolutions in Germany and Italy and to some extent the Republican "revolution" in the 1980s and 1990s fit that model.
In short, there are many roads that may lead to a revolutionary social change or at least serious challenge to the status quo.
Wojtek